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Welcome to Northeastern University’s science and research blog. We call it iNSolution because that’s what our faculty and student researchers are in the business of—finding solutions to societal problems while simultaneously contributing to the fundamental knowledge base of their respective fields.

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We want to hear your ideas and endeavors, your questions, compliments, and complaints. Please feel free to email us at t.singer@neu.edu or get in touch the old fashioned way by calling 617.373.7394. Also, don’t forget to comment on the posts! A blog is better when its readers are also part of its voice.

Weekly Webcrawl: October 19, 2013

The photo of the week is called “phys­ical graf­fiti” and was found on Flickr a week late. The dudes who the­o­rized the bit of physics acknowl­edged here won the Nobel in Physics last week. Photo by Skott Яeader.

Why do four-​​day work weeks always seem to last longer than the others? I got pre­cisely zero things com­pleted this week because there just wasn’t enough time! And that, of course, included the webcrawl.

But I’m glad it’s a day late, because it allows me to include this Wired opinion piece on the “darknet,” a par­allel internet-​​verse for the crim­i­nals among us, but which offers an inter­esting answer to all the shenani­gans sur­rounding the NSA’s recently revealed data col­lec­tion practices.

Sadly, we’d all like to pre­tend that sexual harass­ment doesn’t happen, but it does. A lot. Across prob­ably all pro­fes­sional sec­tors. Wy should we expect sci­ence writing and jour­nalism to be any dif­ferent? They’re not. The com­mu­nity was reminded of that this week.

And, finally on a hap­pier note, here’s a great infographic-​​esque video pub­lished in Sep­tember by fellow-​​science-​​writer-​​friend Aatash Bhatia. It describes why moving through a fluid envi­ron­ment is such a dif­ferent expe­ri­ence for sperm and sperm whales. It will blow your mind.

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